ForensiLock: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Secure Digital Evidence Management

Digital evidence management in cybercrime cases requires robust guarantees of integrity, traceability, and admissibility under the law. Traditional centralized models are often subject to tampering, unauthorized access, and poor documentation of the chain of custody. In this paper, the authors have proposed a decentralized cyber evidence management framework called ForensiLock that incorporates smart contracts and blockchain technology along with distributed IPFS storage solutions[3][7]. The proposed solution records transactions on the blockchain and uses IPFS for storing the evidence while maintaining scalability. In addition, a formal forensic lifecycle model and its validation protocols have also been proposed for ensuring the integrity and custody of cyber evidence. The performance of the proposed solution has been evaluated experimentally to ensure immediate detection of tampering attempts, prevention of unauthorized custody transfers, and zero successful unauthorized access attempts compared to traditional solutions. The security of the proposed solution has also been analyzed to ensure that the integrity of the evidence is maintained and that the solution is resistant to insider attacks and server compromise.